Japan vehicles, factories damaged in Tianjin blasts

Smoke rises from a yard where now-charred vehicles had been stored for export in Tianjin, China.

PHOTO: Japan News/ANN

Toyota Motor Corp. and other Japanese businesses have reported various damage caused by the huge explosions in the Chinese trading port city of Tianjin on Wednesday night.

If recovery work is protracted, the operations of these Japanese firms may be affected, as many of them have production centers in Tianjin, observers said. According to the Japan External Trade Organization, about 800 Japanese companies operate in Tianjin.

At Toyota's joint-venture compact car manufacturing plant, located about two kilometers from the explosion site, new vehicles stored outdoors were damaged, the company reported. The plant was closed from Sunday with workers on an eight-day summer vacation. Toyota's public relations office said production plans for after the vacation period are still under consideration.

Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. reported that more than 100 new vehicles were damaged in a storage yard about two kilometers from the blast site, while Mazda Motor Corp. said glass was damaged in vehicles that were ready for shipment. Mazda also said it closed its showroom in the area on Thursday because the building housing the showroom and the vehicles within had been damaged.

At an Aeon mall also located about two kilometers away from the explosion site, some windows had been broken and a portion of the outer walls had been blown off, the major mall operator said. The blasts occurred outside of its business hours but some employees may have been in the mall, so Aeon is working to confirm whether any of its employees were injured.

It is not yet known when business will be resumed at the mall, Aeon said.

Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings Ltd. said that at its department store, about four kilometers from the blast site, the ceiling and wall near the entrance on the first floor had been blown off. A crime prevention shutter was said to have been bent by the blast from the explosion.

The major department store chain operator decided to close three hours earlier than usual, at 6 p.m., in anticipation of the possible disruption of transportation services.

The owners of the hazardous goods storage company at the centre of the incident, Rui Hai International Logistics, reportedly included the son of a former police chief who used his connections to help the firm obtain the necessary permits and pass inspections.

Thousands of tonnes of hazardous chemicals were stored at the site, officials have said, including about 700 tonnes of highly poisonous sodium cyanide, a white powder or crystal which can give off lethal hydrogen cyanide gas.

Chinese authorities struggled Friday to extinguish fires and identify dangerous chemicals at a devastated industrial site, two days after giant explosions killed dozens and left residents in fear of being cloaked in a toxic cloud.

Officials in the northern port city of Tianjin, where the blasts killed at least 56 people and injured more than 700, told a news conference they did not yet know what materials were at the hazardous goods storage facility that exploded, or the cause of the blast.

Some police wore no protective clothing, while others had full-face gas masks, although an environmental expert told an official press conference that toxic gas indicators were within normal ranges and the air “should be safe for residents to breathe”.

Under Chinese regulations, warehouses stocking dangerous materials must be at least one kilometre (0.6 miles) away from surrounding public buildings and main roads, it said, but there were two residential compounds and several main roads within that distance.

China's CCTV reported the toll on Twitter, adding that President Xi Jinping had urged "all-out efforts to rescue victims and extinguish fire," as a blaze continued to rage at the site where more people were feared to be trapped.

Much of the area surrounding the explosion is made up of construction sites for residential and office buildings. Worker dormitories, built of flimsy sheets of thin metal, were torn apart by the blast.

The magnitude of the first explosion was the equivalent of detonating three tons of TNT, the China Earthquake Networks Centre said on its verified Weibo account, while a second was the equivalent of detonating 21 tons of the explosive.

Communist Party newspaper the People's Daily said 13 people were killed in the explosion in a post on Chinese social network Weibo, adding in a separate post that more remained trapped by a huge fire unleashed by the explosives.